Drafting By Feel Part 2

Welcome back to the two-part tutorial ambiguously titled Drafting By Feel!

In Part 1, we discussed (in meandering detail) the armhole of Jenna's Halloween cardigan. Today, we'll be discussing sleeve caps. The aim of this tutorial is to demonstrate how I visualized a sleeve for Jenna's cardigan and translated that into a paper pattern.

Quick recap: this is the finished cardigan. Note that the sleeves stick out rather than hang vertically from the shoulder - we discussed in this post that sleeves which are set closer to the horizontal level tend to allow more freedom of movement and are subsequently more comfortable.

I like comparing-and-contrasting as a way to further define what we're talking about, so let's take a quick detour and do that here. Here is that 2016 Beauxbaton blazer superimposed on the cardigan - the sleeves of the blazer are set more vertically than the cardigan's. This produces sleeker lines at the shoulder and armhole of the finished garment but not as much comfort during movement.

Compare these now to a RTW woven shirt from Old Navy, whose armholes also happen to be smaller (understandably so, given that it's a first-layer shirt and not a second-layer overgarment). The sleeves of this RTW shirt hang more vertically than either of the handmade garments.

When worn, the sleeve of the RTW shirt will probably look the sleekest, particularly on models in a catalogue, but it is the least comfortable should those models choose to actually raise their arms. If you've tried on RTW shirts in fitting rooms that looked great on the rack, only to find your arms feel like they've been trussed up about your shoulders, now you know why. Pencil-thin consumers could possibly feel a decent level of comfort in sleeves like these, but the vast majority of us have real arms, and these sleeves, while perfect for posing, are not as practical for actual moving (or cartwheels, or anything else that is part of a child's typical range of movement).

End of detour. Let's return to handmade now, to the sleeve caps of those two handmade garments - the 2016 blazer's is on the left, and the 2017 cardigan's is on the right - and make two observations (actually, it's a Ravenclaw cardigan but I'm too lazy to make corrections to the photo; sorry, HP fans).

One, the blazer's sleeve cap is higher than the cardigan's. Not very much higher (we'll revisit this specific observation at the end of the chapter), but still some.

Two, and more significantly, the blazer's sleeve cap is narrower than the cardigan's.

Taken together, these two dimensions - the width and height - shape the sleeve cap. In this example, they indicate that the blazer has a pointier/less flat sleeve cap than the cardigan. This is nothing new to us, because I have shared numerous diagrams and photos exactly like these, with identical accompanying conclusions, in previous drafting posts.

What's new today is perhaps how I decided how flat/pointy/broad/wide to draw the cardigan sleeve cap, based on the kind of fit I visualized in my head.

I'm going to introduce a new idea right here: PRIORITIES.

This might be a word we don't see often in drafting terminology. When we first begin to draft, everything seems equally important. We feel like we need to measure every dimension of the body, draw lines that pass through every point on our draft, stick to every formula and instruction. Do not berate yourselves, friends, if this is your drafting method. We all begin to learn something by obeying. 

As we become a little more comfortable with drafting, we begin to see that these measurements and formulae are only a framework for obtaining a draft. If we're feeling sufficiently reckless, we might even experiment a little: shift a dart, reduce an armhole, measure around the abdomen instead of the hips. The results of those experiments are not failures - they are still bona fide drafts, but now they fit a little differently than would have if we'd stuck to the formulae. "Oh," we say, "so that's what moving the dart up an inch does. Hm." It is a fortuitous learning moment.

Now, what if you'd actually desired that alternative fit - the fuller bust, the more mobile sleeve, the blessed absence of drag lines along the side seam of a pencil skirt - and were able to factor that into your drafting from the beginning? It wouldn't be accidental, then, would it? It would be a choice - something you prioritized (a smaller armhole) over something else (drafting the recommended armhole size according to the schema) toward a known end.

We're going to prioritize in TWO stages.

When we draft a sleeve cap, there are three distances that we use together. Because these three distances are interrelated, we usually obtain the final shape of our final sleeve cap by juggling and balancing these three distances. 

In the first stage, we prioritize the most important distance according to the ultimate goal of drafting a sleeve.

The first distance is the sleeve cap length. This is the most important distance in the entire sleeve draft. This is because it has to match the size of the armhole, and is thus -in a manner of speaking - non-negotiable.

The next distance is the width of the sleeve cap. While this is a useful reference distance, it is less important. This means you can adjust it.

The third distance is the sleeve cap height. It partially determines the pointy-ness of the sleeve cap, and is thus important. However, it is also adjustable.  

Here, I want to gently expand the scope of your power as a drafting person: you have more control than you think. You are a shaper; you are not dictated by impotent numbers. What we're going to do today is draft a sleeve cap whose length matches the size of the armhole. Since the armhole is 17" around, we'll need a sleeve cap distance that's 17". Beyond this non-negotiable number, everything else is flexible. 

If we're feeling especially autonomous, we can simply freehand a 17"-long curvy line that's vaguely sleeve-cap-shaped. It will take us less than 10 seconds. This is essentially what I did when I drafted the sleeve cap for Jenna's cardigan. I'm going to reconstruct my thought sequence so you can follow along the visualization process with me.

"I need to draw a sleeve cap. Half of it is the front and half of it is the back."

"The finished sleeve cap must fit in the armhole I drew earlier."

"The inflection point of the armscye will (roughly) match the inflection point of that half of the sleeve cap (i.e. front-to-front, back-to-back)."

"When the sleeve cap is in the armhole, the sleeve will hang at this angle - not too vertical but not kimono-horizontal, either, 

because that's what I envision the finished garment to look like - comfortable for arm movement."

"Now what gradients should I assign to those sleeve cap curves? (i.e. how steep should those mountain-looking slopes be?)? Let's imagine what I'll get if I have differently-sloped sleeve cap curves. 

If I draw steeper curves (red curve in the photo below, which produce a pointer sleeve cap) and fit that sleeve cap into the (blue) armscye, 

the sleeve is going to hang more vertically. This is probably going to restrict movement. Jenna's going to want to wave her arms around a lot. So, no.

"And if I draw a much more gradual curve (the yellow curve, which produces a flatter sleeve cap) and fit that sleeve into the (blue) armscye, 

the sleeve will be set far too close to the horizontal. It will be comfortable like a kaftan but there'll be excessive fabric pooling in the armpit area when the wearer's arms hang in their rest position. So, no go."

"This is the shape that when set into the armhole, will produce sleeves that hang at the natural angle that I want."

End of visualization exercise.

Now that I've visualized the shape of the sleeve cap, let's now take some reference measurements and walk through the drawing process. Note that I didn't actually need any of the following measurements to freehand a 17" curve, but they are useful for reference and checking.

First, I measured Jenna's arm. I took two measurements. One was the circumference of her bicep. This would be the fullest part of her upper arm. Like the armhole measurement, I made a loop and adjusted its size for comfort.

For the second measurement, I located her shoulder point, lay the measuring tape along her arm,

with my fingers and thumb felt along her arm for the level where the fullest part of her arm would be (which was also where I'd taken the bicep measurement)

and located that on the measuring tape. This distance - 3.5" in this case - is the height of a sleeve cap that corresponds to the shape of Jenna's arm. If I'd let my fingers drop lower - to, say, 4.5", you can tell that that would not be the position of the fullest part (her bicep) of her upper arm. And if we were to create a sleeve cap that corresponds to this untrue position of her bicep, we'd get a pointier sleeve cap than would correspond to this arm. This in turn would result in an ill-fitting sleeve. 

Now we transfer all those numbers to paper.

First, I draw a horizontal reference line at the top of the paper, and a second horizontal reference line 3.5" below that. This separation is the height of the sleeve cap that we measured on Jenna's arm. We are going to draw the sleeve cap between those two lines. 

Next, we'll divide those lines into two halves. One half becomes the front half of the sleeve cap and the other, the back,

and each of those half sleeve caps will match their respective half-armscyes in length.

Now we'll draw one of those half-armscyes. Let's start with the back. Our aim is to draw a curve like the one below - it helps if we're already familiar with typical sleeve cap shapes, but essentially, we begin at the top of the sleeve cap, and sketch downward to the lower horizontal line. At this stage, we won't worry about where on that second horizontal line we end up - 

which is to say that this horizontal width is less important than the sleeve cap height;

what's more important is that the length of that curved line matches the length of the back armscye of our bodice draft. We'll use a measuring tape - just lay it on its edge along the curve - to ascertain this.

Next we draw the front half of the sleeve cap. Again, we match its length to the front armscye's,

being less concerned about the horizontal distance,

and paying attention to these differences between the front and back sleeve cap shapes:

This process typically takes about 5 minutes, at the end of which we'll have a preliminary sleeve cap that matches the armhole, and whose height matches the bicep position on the wearer's arm.

Finally, let's bring in that horizontal distance we've been so diligently ignoring. In typical sleeve drafts, this is the exact bicep circumference, and we fix it early in the drafting process and draw our sleeve cap curves in reference to it.

This often produces a snugly-fitting sleeve (at least around the bicep) with sleeve cap curves that soar high in order to match the length of the armscyes of the bodice.

There's nothing wrong with this approach, incidentally. It's just another formula for producing a fitted sleeve - in this case, the priority is on creating a sleeve that's snug around the bicep and armpit. Remember, this kind of sleeve does look beautiful and sleek. Unfortunately, sometimes this profile is at the expense of comfort, particularly in fuller-armed wearers, who would experience peaking at the shoulder and pulling around the armpit when actually moving their arms.

There are times when we would choose this profile - formalwear, for instance, when clean lines and sleek silhouettes are paramount. However, when I draft for children and individuals with fuller upper arms, and when I'm making garments for everyday wear in which comfort and freedom of movement are preferred over those sleek lines, I don't fix that bicep line.

Instead I fix the height of the sleeve cap, and draft within the constraints it provides. What "gives", then, is the width of that horizontal bicep line.

And here we make reference to that second stage of prioritizing: what factor is is of dominant importance in the shape of a sleeve cap? 

You see, the 17" sleeve cap distance being constant, we can choose to:

1. use a fixed bicep width and vary the sleeve cap height to get the 17" curved distance, or
2. use a fixed sleeve cap height and vary the bicep width to get the 17" curved distance.

Drafting resources often use the first approach because it's easy to teach diagrammatically.
I often use the second approach when drafting for comfort (i.e. for kids), and a combination of the two when drafting for both aesthetics and movement.

The important thing I keep in mind when using the variable-bicep-width approach then, is to ensure that at any time in the draft, the width of the sleeve cap should not be less than the bicep circumference we measured on the wearer. Why? So that the sleeve will be comfortable. It's common sense, and thus meaningful.

It's easier than you think, because the sleeve cap is so flat to begin with. But yes, even as I'm drawing and re-drawing my 3.5"-high curves to get them to match the 17" distance, I'm keeping that in mind. 

Here's a pictorial example of how I might use a combination of both approaches. Suppose I start by drawing the black sleeve cap below. It's 3.5" high but my first sketch turns out not to be 17" long as I'd hoped.

In order for it to be 17" long, I'll need to either spread the end points much farther apart or space them much closer together. This changes the shape of the sleeve cap even as I'm keeping the 3.5" height constant. 

In my mind, I immediately visualize the angle of hang of the sleeves changing drastically (remember the newspaper drafts in the earlier visualization exercise?), which is what I want to avoid. 

What I need to keep consistent is then the shape of the sleeve cap i.e. the gradients of the curves, even as I am increasing and decreasing their distances. Here is a diagram of how that might look. Notice that the height of the sleeve cap will need to change along with the widths in order to keep the 'mountains' looking the same. When set into their corresponding armholes, sleeves made from these three sleeve caps should now hang at the same angle.  

This is what I meant earlier when I described the drafting of a sleeve cap as a fluid juggling of interrelated factors: sleeve cap height, gradients of curves, horizontal width. They're choices I make and prioritize in turn, in order to achieve the outcome I want.

Well, friends, we've come to the end of another long drafting tutorial on sleeves and armholes. We began with Jenna's cardigan; here to end are some pictures of Emily's Moaning Myrtle robe. This one has a very different fit: flowy-flared, oversize, designed to accommodate many more layers underneath than Emily has on in the photo. How does one draft for variables like these? The sloper method, with its snug-fit requirements, would be impractical.

Measurement list for Emily's Moaning Myrtle Robe (Hood pre-drafted from Wizard Robe here)

There is so much to unpack in drafting, and this just brushes the surface. Beyond the shape and size of the sleeve cap in two dimensions are other features with which to further shape it in three dimensions: pleats, darts, gussets, for instance, which would then be incorporated into the style of the garment itself. As I'd said in the first part of this tutorial, this isn't new stuff - people have been drafting all shapes and sizes of sleeve caps and armholes from the dawn of time. I'm hoping that this new way of looking at old information might help you understand not only why your drafts look the way they do, but that you have a lot more control in the process than you might imagine. 

Remember: it always begins with the question, "What exactly is the fit that I want on this body?" Ask it, then answer it in a way that is visually meaningful to you. Now go forth and make beautiful (and comfortable) garments! 

Drafting By Feel Part 1

Hello, friends!

Shall we take another break from the Menagerie roundup, this time to talk about drafting? I've been wanting to write this post since I made my kids' Halloween costumes last October. It wasn't so much to share the costumes themselves  but to discuss another approach to drafting that I thought might be interesting. 

Believe it or not, this is the only picture we have of all three girls in their costumes. They're all Hogwarts students: Jenna is Cho Chang, Emily is Moaning Myrtle and Kate is Ginny Weasley.

Let me begin by saying that these were fast costumes to make. I had several things going for me, including

• the design: the costumes weren't elaborate - skirts, cardigans and robes;
• the fit: they also weren't form-fitting like their princess dresses of yore, and
• the materials: each garment was single-layered. There was no lining or overlays and  the fabric itself was regular everyday-wear stuff rather than the sheers, silks or flowy, unstable knits that I typically use for costumes.

What I didn't have was the actual children with me during the making. Unlike their much younger princess-dress selves who hung out at home and could be easily accosted for multiple rounds of measurement, measurement re-checks and interim fitting sessions, the children of 2017 were busy Being Elsewhere: school, the neighbors' houses, evening sports, birthday parties. Which meant that I had one chance to measure them and one fitting before the final garment had to be ready. 

Also, one and a half days to do it (helloooo procrastination, my old friend).

I usually am quite systematic when I sew garments. First, there has to be a basic block/sloper made for each child, and because the children keep growing, a new block has to be drafted for each Halloween costume season. I begin with a very detailed list of measurements, and use those to draft the block. 

Then, I adapt that block into the costume itself. I redraw the seams according to its design elements (e.g. flared skirt, bell sleeves, etc.), and add fitting and design ease for the wearer's movement and style and type of fabric, respectively. Sometimes this involves grabbing the child again for new measurements that I hadn't taken the first time around because they weren't block/sloper-related: design-related dimensions like the circumference of a semi-circular skirt, the dip of a drop waist, the width of a boat neck. The block then becomes a paper pattern for that particular costume.

Next, I lay that paper pattern on the fabric and cut. Then down goes the presser foot and - finally - we're in business. Again I grab the child, for a fitting this time - sometimes multiple times, especially when working with fluid fabric whose behavior cannot fully be accounted for during the drafting process - and I make adjustments. Eventually, when I can find no more adjustments to sensibly make, I declare the garment finished. The pattern gets thrown into the trash (because we can't use it next year - the kids will have grown again), the leftover fabric gets tossed into the remnant bin, and I return to cardboarding or whatever else seems like a fun way to unwind.

That's my typical garment-sewing process. It's systematic because there are rules, procedures and sequences in drafting: what to measure on the body; where on the blank kraft paper to transfer that number to create a seam line, how to pair it with other numbers to produce a dart. It's like making a cake from a recipe: you read "two cups of flour" in your cookbook and you dump two cups of flour into your mixing bowl.

Sometimes, however, I am not systematic. Sometimes it's because I don't want to take the time to be. Sometimes I just want to draft like I did in the old days - by feel rather than by rules. Oh, there would still be a method, certainly, but no recipe. Just what looks right and what should be.

Like Halloween 2017. 

What did that look like in practice? Let me recount.

First, I measured the children (see - still methodical, right?) But what a short list it was, compared to the wall of numbers from previous years! 

Emily 2017: for a hooded robe

Jenna 2017: for a skirt block (first 4 lines of numbers) and V-necked cardigan

Just the bare minimum this time: shoulder width, armhole circumference, chest, sleeve length, cuff, length of garment - measurements you'd expect to find on the back of a pattern packet. Took me five minutes at most. Then I scribbled other numbers - shoulder drop, neck width, dip of neckline - which were estimates, not actual dimensions; I looked at the child's body, visualized the paper pattern, and wrote down what the shape of it looked like as numbers.

Next, I spread out newspaper (couldn't be bothered to locate the fancypants kraft paper), found a random pencil, and started drawing a garment pattern. 

Not a sloper. Skipped that and drew the actual pattern instead.

Whoa.

Is it legal? Does it even work?

Of course it is, and yes it does - provided we know how the numbers on the body translate to lines and shapes and spaces on paper. Visualizing is the key technique in drafting. If you can visualize it, you can draft it. If you can't visualize it, all the drafting rules in the world will only get you partway there, if at all.

Incidentally, it took me less than 5 minutes to draft the front of Jenna's cardigan. Not saying that to brag, but to explain that drafting can be very fast. It doesn't have to be laborious and frowny and slow. It doesn't have to involve a spreadsheet of measurements and french curves and calculators and pondering. Oh, my word, the pondering. I used to ponder. It absolutely ruined drafting for me, let me tell you. Drafting is meant to be liberating, so you can get through the wretched patternmaking in record time and onto the actual sewing. Because that's why we make garments, isn't it - so we can actually sew them?

Anyway, as I was drafting the sleeve cap for Jenna's cardigan, I thought, "This would make a good blog post, actually. I wonder if people might be interested in watching me draw on newspaper if I explained my thought processes - you know, like how I drew a sleeve cap and what decisions drove each curve and distance and line."

So today I thought I'd show you how I draft by feel. To clarify, nothing in this post is really new technique, only perhaps a different approach to achieving the same end product. Think of it this way: I've taught you to draft by numbers (like paint-by-numbers!) and rules, which is all good, but it takes time, and all you're doing is really just following my recipe for making a pattern. Let's do one better and learn to cook, shall we?

Here follows a re-enactment of the drafting process that took place last October. The newspaper patterns here are the actual ones that became our 2017 Halloween costumes. For the sake of time, I want to focus on the armhole and sleeve cap because those are the issues on which I've received the most email requests for comment and help.

Let's start with the finished garment - in this case Jenna's charcoal cardigan. The fabric she picked was a thick sweater knit and I drafted the cardigan to fit over a button-down shirt (and possibly more insulation underneath - in Minnesota, one has to draft for inclement weather one cannot yet predict). 

The first thing you might notice is that the fit, particularly in the shoulder and armhole, is imprecise. By "imprecise" I mean that this will never pass for a sloper. It certainly is very different than the Beauxbaton blazer I made her the year before:

The second thing you might notice is that the fabric is thicker and sweater-y, like a real knit cardigan.

In short, this cardigan was drafted as a casual-fit garment, designed for comfort rather than the aesthetics of a custom fit. It was also drafted to be an over-garment with ease to accommodate the various other-garment layers underneath. 

But how much ease?

There are no rules for the perfect amount of ease to introduce in a child's overgarment so in instances like these, we draft for a specific fit, rather than by the official dimensions of a sloper. In other words, I asked myself exactly what fit I desired for each part of my draft (shoulders, chest, waist, armhole, etc), and draw shapes on paper to achieve that fit. To illustrate, let's unpack my messy measurement notes:

One of the most important things to get right in a bodice draft is the shoulder slope. The shoulder drop is my shortcut method for measuring this. It's a good estimate and usually adequately precise for a casual-fit garment like a Tshirt - or this cardigan.

I had Jenna stand with her back right up against a wall, located the horizontal line from the side of her neck (I believe I grabbed a random flyer off the coffee table and held it at this level, and measured down to her shoulder point: 2". 

Now that we have the location of the shoulder point, we need the position of the bottom of the armscye. The chest measurement gives us its horizontal position i.e. how far it is horizontally from the Center Front line. 

For a pre-pubsecent child + this loose-fit garment, I literally measured a comfortable chest circumference and quartered that. 

* Normally, this would be  1/2 (Front Chest Measurement), especially when
 drafting for women and/or in sloper drafts. For the amount of ease
in this garment, 1/4 of the Full Chest Measurement will probably 
not differ significantly from the 1/2 (Front Chest Measurement). 

Here are three common ways to obtain the vertical position:

1. Vertically down from the side-of-neck level,
2. Vertically down from the shoulder-point level, or
3. Vertically up from the waist level 

Some drafting resources suggest formulae or rules of thumb that tell you how many inches below or above each of these levels to plot this point. It's all good, but I always found myself asking, "Yes, but how came you by that number?  Why x inches? Why not y inches? "

Here is how I like to determine this Bottom Of The Armscye Position: I measure around an imaginary armhole on the wearer.

I like this method because it is visually meaningful to me: it represents an actual loop of fabric that will surround the upper arm of a real wearer. It takes into account the wearer's clothes (remember in this case, the cardigan will be worn over a shirt, which is why Jenna is being measured around the fabric of her shirt), and also the wearer's shoulder shape, muscle tone, distribution of flesh, posture, etc. With this method, I can ask Jenna, "Does this feel comfortable? Is it too tight?" and her feedback will help me determine how snug or non-snug I need to make this armhole. Always remember that even though you will draft the front and back bodices separately, you are ultimately drafting a whole armhole; the front and back armscyes by themselves are meaningless. 

How snug do I make this loop? Ah. Good question.

Remember the golden rule of drafting armholes: always aim to make the smallest possible armhole that is still comfortable. So start snug and then loosen the loop of tape until you have what you think will be a practical armhole size. Ask the wearer if the loop feels comfortable to them. Ask them to move their arm around and watch for impediments. And it goes without saying that the wearer needs to be wearing whatever they will be wearing under the finished garment - underwear, camisole, Tshirt, sweater, etc. 

So, having determined the final size of the loop (17", in this case; Jenna's fingers have let the tape slip slightly),

I now record that measurement. 

Next, I note the position of the bottom of that loop, using whatever reference line is most convenient (in this case, the side of neck),

and record that vertical distance.

Now that vertical distance is no longer an arbitrary number but a dimension that is meaningful to me because it's directly related to the circumferential size of an armscye that I'm confident is comfortable for the wearer. 

Now I visualize the shape of an armscye that is roughly half the whole armhole measurement, so about 8.5". However, because the front and back armscyes are never identical, with the front usually a little longer than the back, I usually round that half-measurement up. So rather than 8.5" for the front and back, I might choose 9" for the front and 8" for the back. Or 8 7/8" for the front and 8 1/8" for the back - whatever numbers are required to produce a curve that ends 5 3/4" below the side-of-neck level (see next point). 

Now that we know the dimensions of the curve we're drawing, what will be its curvature? Since we know that armscyes have pretty standard shapes, we'll start there. Some drafting resources instruct measuring the high bust and high chest and other such distances. This gives you additional points to plot on your draft that help you refine the shape of the armscye curve. See red arrows in the photo below. 

However.

Perhaps it's just me, but I've often wondered if there were also rules governing the exact level of, say, the high bust measurement. Is it, for instance, always exactly 2" above the bust apex? For all women, regardless of height or size? What about women with perky vs. saggy busts? What about children? What about toddlers vs. tweens? 

See red arrows in the photo below - which one do I use?

And where exactly are the end points of a front high chest measurement? Do you have the model wear a garment and measure between the armhole seams of that pre-existing garment? Always? Regardless of the fit of that garment?

I have very, very rarely, if at all never used a high bust or high chest measurement when I draft. Not because it is a bad measurement, but because it was never visually meaningful to me. It might be a meaningful measurement for you, in which case, please continue using it, okay? 

Let's move on! Here is Jenna's front sloper - unfortunately, I chopped off the jewel neckline in an earlier stage of drafting in favor of the final V-neck, but the armhole at least is still intact.

Let's - at last - draw that armscye. Typically, I begin the armscye from the shoulder point, and draw down at roughly 90 degrees. Not always; sometimes a person's shoulders are so slanty that a 90 degree line would continue into a very weird pseudo-cap-sleeve-looking armscye. But 90 degrees is a good starting point, and you can refine the slant of that line or the general armscye shape later. 

Finish the armscye by creating that armpit scoop and ending at the side seam at also (roughly) 90 degrees. Don't worry about the shape. What's more important is the length of that armscye curve.  

In the next photo, the red line is an example of an armscye I might've drawn early in the process. Suppose that after measuring its length, I realize it's not quite long enough to meet the "almost 9" requirement.

So I draw a few more, each line longer than the one before. Notice that I create longer lines by making deeper curves, and NOT by lowering the bottom of the armscye (we'll return to this idea later when we draft the back armscye).

I measure each line until I have one of the right length.

Did you also notice that I continually measure the length of the armscye as I adjust its shape? This is important, because we're drafting an armhole of a certain size and we need to keep this constant even as the shape changes.

Incidentally, when I was beginning to draft, I always thought armholes looked enormous on paper compared to the arm they would eventually enclose. I mean, that armscye drops almost 6" below the neck and cuts way into the chest area! So great were my doubts that I actually disregarded the measurements and made corrections to my draft toward a more "conservative" size. It took some dramatically-failed muslins to eventually learn to trust the numbers! Moral of the story: had I been able to visualize what those 2-D lines and numbers looked like in 3-D, I could've spared myself a lot of grief. 

To show you how simple that would've been, here's one such visualization exercise:

And really, that final yellow line isn't a lot of curved distance, nor is it as "cut-in" as I'd thought, even for a child, and especially for an overgarment that has to accommodate a billowy button-down shirt. See?

Let's do the back armscye now. Here is my draft. Typically, the back armscye is a fair bit straighter than the front. This is because the scoop of the front armscye accommodates the shoulder's ball joint and the forward motion of the arm that the back armscye doesn't. For this draft, however, this orange line would've measured 7", maybe 7.5" in length - way too short for the 8 - 8 1/8" needed to ensure an overall 17" armhole.

I'm bringing this up because sometimes this happens in drafting: you follow the rules to a T . . . and they produce a garment that is acutely uncomfortable. Then you find yourself stuck in a legalistic quandary just like this one: use the typical back armscye shape and get a tiny armhole, or break the rules a little and actually be able to move your arm?

Break the rules, duh.

But which of the one millionty thousand drafting rules to break? 

Here's one possibility: keep the straighter (typical) curve but lower the bottom of the armscye. Numerically, it works. But now the side seam is shorter. Which means we need to lower the bottom of the front armscye, too, in order for the side seams to match when sewn together. Which means lengthening the front armscye in the same way as you did the back. Which means increasing the overall size of the full armhole. Which flouts the golden rule of armholedom: always draft the smallest possible armhole that's still comfortable. 

So no-go. Instead, we re-shape the back armscye so it's more curvy (and less typical), and so attain the 8" or 8 1/8" independently of the dimensions of the front bodice.

Here's the total armhole, made by bringing the front and back bodices together at their side seams.

At the risk of sounding trivial, allow me to recap our goal for this portion of the draft: to create an armhole that was 17" around and whose bottom was vertically about 5 3/4" from the neck. Which we did, without fancy rulers or formulae - just visualizing, and drawing on paper exactly what we wanted the fit of the garment to be around Jenna's arm and shoulder.

And because this post ended up being longer than I'd expected, I've split it into two parts so we could stop here. See you back here for Part 2: The Sleeve!